“Mousehunt” is a silly comedy about two brothers chasing a smart mouse that was left as inheritance from their father. I think I actually stumbled upon this movie once. It’s “Laurel and Hardy” type fun, so not very smart.

The score sounds way smarter than the movie. The main titles are exciting and flamboyant and a pleasure to listen to. They actually form into a coherent theme, reprised in the long “End credits” and it’s more than I expected to find in this score.

I also appreciate the shortness of the score, because for a cartoonish movie like this, a 30 minute score with very short cues works fine. “Mousehunt” switches from jazz (“Chez Ernie”) to playful whistling (“What are you doing?”) to adventurous (“Nail gun” and “Hot tubbogan”) without making much sense of it. But, like I said, being so short, it doesn’t give me time to get bored or dislike it. Silvestri’s compositions are in parts more dramatic than I would have expected, and it’s a good thing. “Silent movie” for example is a tender violin track which sounds as taken from a 40s movie.

For me, the standard for scores for this type of movies is defined by the two “Home alone” compositions from John Williams. Enjoyable as “Mousehunt” is sometimes, it’s nowhere near that so I probably won’t listen to it again. But that main theme is worth a listen.